“No,” I say. “Let me see! Let me understand!” I plead. A woman, very much not my mother, one I haven’t seen before, dressed in thick chainmail and dull silver battle armor, comes to the forefront.
“That is not for your eyes. None of this is for your eyes. Keep the balance, that is what you do. Always do we fight. Never do we kill.” She disappears into the deck again.
“YOU WILL NOT DO THIS!” they boom suddenly in unison almost as if deviating angrily from their looping soundtrack. But I’ve heard all of the tape already and I try to ignore them, thinking hard about what has been said and not said, about what I have glimpsed beyond them. The women suddenly flicker and burn out, vanishing entirely. It’s dark all around me now, almost as if the moon itself has gone out – the trees, my only company in the clearing. What does ‘it cannot be unlinked without desire’ even mean?
“What are we?” I ask the stone below me. It says nothing to me. I look up at where the moon used to be and shout at it. “WHAT AM I?” my voice tears at the atmosphere, the power of it shocking even me.
“We have been called thousands of names,” a layered, guttural voice says, reverberating up through the stone. I spin around looking for the paper-women, but I am alone. Just the moonlight and the stone, the voice echoing off the rocks and trees. “Badb, Macha, Nemain, Rhiannon, Aine, Danu, Banshee, Nigheag Na H-ath, Buanann, Epona, Medb, Valkyrie. There are endless names,” the strange words echo inside of me, completely foreign and yet somehow icily familiar. They feel like the blood in my veins. There’s a flash of white and a lightning strike pierces the stone. When I open my eyes there is a woman before me, not like the flickering paper-women of before, but a woman, flesh and blood, solid as I am. It’s the same tattooed woman from the field. She looks less like my mother or me, and more like some version of us all concocted in a place where dreams meet nightmares. Strange markings cover her skin and though the stone is still in my hand it is also tied around her neck. Her eyes are wide, black pools, inhumanly large, and her hair writhes, as if alive. She is so close that her breath is hot on my cheek. She radiates power and fear and love. She pushes into me, so we are nearly eye to eye. I try not to blink, afraid I’ll miss something.
“WE ARE A GOD. WE ARE THE MORRIGAN,” she says, and the volume of her voice nearly blows out my eardrums. She draws back slightly and as she does so another lightning strike hits the stone and her form shifts into three giant black crows that tear into the night sky and disappear screaming.
•
Delia, Bonnie, and Liz run around the penthouse, like ghosts, attached to leashes glued to my hand. They haunt me and taunt me and sometimes bring their friends – Lena, Joan, and some of the boys whose names I’ve long forgotten. It’s ironic that the only ghost I want to see is Adrian, but he doesn’t come since he’s the only one I haven’t managed to kill. My last tie to life, to redemption. The only person I’ve ever cared for that I haven’t utterly destroyed.
I’m starting to think I might be a little crazy.
But on the plus side, I’ve figured out that I really don’t need to eat to stay alive, which should totally go on the ‘list of things awesome about being me’, but I’ve forgotten what the other things on the list were, so I don’t bother to add it. I talk to Liz’s ear all day long, often gesturing at the ghosts around me, trying to make it understand how hopeless it all is.
I’ve had at least four, maybe five bottles of tequila today in continued celebration of my awesome-victory-slash-birthday when the penthouse elevator slides open. I assume it’s Jeeves or some other random minion, but I’m immediately pissed because I can hear it’s nice and quiet outside, so I know there are no emergencies. I drag my way toward the elevator prepared to hand someone their head.
My heart almost stops when I see it’s a flesh-and-blood Adrian standing in front of me.
“A-Adria-” is all I get out before he shoots me in the stomach. I stumble forward, doubling over and he stabs a needle in my bare arm. I look at him and he does it again. Everything swims in front of me and I’m gone.
°
When I open my eyes it’s dusk, which means I have lost at least a day. The ground around me is wet as if I have been rained on but I remain dry. The stone is still in my hand, but when I touch the delicately carved edges of the crow, it feels hot. The ridges in the stone below me feel hot as well. Was it all just a dream? It didn’t feel like a dream. And what dream lasts nearly a day? I feel like I have been given a gift, but I’m not entirely sure it’s a gift I want. The women and their riddles reverberate in my head. “We are The Morrigan,” I say out loud to myself and the woods. “What the hell is a Morrigan?”